Barretos sits in the northern reach of São Paulo state, and for generations it was where the walking stopped. Cattle fattened on pasture in Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul and Mato Grosso were driven overland to the slaughterhouses here, moved by entourages of riders who spent weeks in the saddle with the herd. The riding contests that filled their idle afternoons were not entertainment for anyone but themselves; they were a way of settling who was best at the thing they all did for a living. Bull riding came later, and from somewhere else. The tradition of climbing onto a bucking bull rather than a horse — harder, heavier, considerably more dangerous — was imported from the United States and grafted onto a Brazilian working culture that already knew what it was looking at.

In 1955 a group of bachelors in Barretos organized the first recorded Festa do Peão de Boiadeiro. They called their social club Os Independentes, and more than seventy years later the same organization still runs the festival. The timing was never arbitrary: the event lands each August alongside 25 August, the anniversary of the founding of Barretos, so the rodeo and the city's birthday have always been the same celebration wearing different hats. The fiftieth edition came in 2005; the seventieth in 2025. In that span the festival built a reputation abroad for the quality of its riders and its stock — the cowboys and cowgirls who enter, and the horses and bulls they draw.

Until 1984 the festivities happened in Paulo de Lima Park, in the middle of town, where the cattle expositions of the 1960s through the 1980s were events in their own right. Then Os Independentes did something unusual for a rodeo: they commissioned a permanent home from Oscar Niemeyer. Since 1985 the festival has occupied a 110-hectare park anchored by a stadium built to hold 35,000 people, and the result is one of the odder juxtapositions in Brazilian architecture — the curving concrete vocabulary that shaped Brasília's ministries, wrapped around an arena of churned red dirt, bucking chutes and pickup riders. The scale of the grounds means the festival is not only a rodeo. It is a temporary city, assembled and struck every year.

The arena's second life is as a concert stage, and the guest list is not what you would predict from a cattle town: Shakira, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Gloria Gaynor, A-Ha, Mariah Carey. The one the organizers had chased longest was Shania Twain. Negotiations ran more than twenty years before the festival agreed to a fee of R$4 million; the announcement posted to the Festa do Peão page on 26 February 2018 drew 1.3 million views on Facebook alone. One million people came through Parque do Peão that weekend. The Brazilian country star Marília Mendonça and the Swiss pop singer Bastian Baker opened, and Twain herself did not take the stage until midnight, in front of 55,000 people. Brazilian outlets, G1 among them, rated it one of the best performances the festival has ever staged.

Strip away the sound systems and what remains is a competition about staying attached to an animal that would rather you did not. That is worth remembering at Barretos more than at most rodeos, because here the lineage is unusually short and unusually clear. The people in the chutes are a few generations removed from the drovers who invented the contest out of boredom and pride at the end of a cattle road, and the festival still coincides with the founding date of the town those roads led to. A million visitors is a startling number for any event. It is more startling for one that began with a handful of tired riders and a difficult horse.